All things that Suck, and a few things that are Awesome

Tag Archives: Republicans

As a liberal-leaning person, I get really pissed off when my obvious conservative friends and acquaintances share news stories from Fox News. These stories are obviously biased (“But only because the mainstream media is left-biased!”) and I don’t understand why anyone would ever be proud of getting their news from such a biased source. But Fox News isn’t even that bad compared to Breitbart or some of the other really questionable news sources out there. I’m talking the American News sites out there. Everything on these sites are so perfectly geared to target the conservative mindset it’s almost unbelievable. I don’t get how people can read shit that just confirms everything they believe and not be any bit suspicious of it.

I used the conservative news outlets as an example because they are most obvious to me as a left-leaning person. But the thing is that the left has it’s own bullshit websites and it’s own news (or even “news”) networks that conjure up the same hate and nonsense that the right has. It isn’t as visible (to me at least) but it’s there and it’s equally pathetic.

For the equivalent of Fox News you have MSNBC. While Fox has shit to prop up the conservative agenda and try to make Trump out to be a masterful genius, MSNBC does the exact same thing in the opposite direction by demonizing him. Everything is how terrible Trump is, how he’s destroying America, how he’s moments away from being impeached, and while the stories do present facts, the speculation and “meaning” of those facts is used to paint Trump is a highly negative view. How about Huffington Post? Nope. I’ve read enough stories from there to know that it’s going to be feel-good liberal propaganda to get me and other like-minded people riled up about Trump. I don’t know how Mother Jones compares to American News, but they seem to be nearly equal and opposites of the same idea: fear mongering to appeal to a single side. Democracy Now! seems even worse though, go check it out.

I really think part of the problem with our current state of sensationalized, polarized politics is due to this sort of one-sided news reporting, where facts take second stage to the speculation behind a story. Facts are pretty damn tame stuff that sound boring. Do an experiment for yourself: go to the BBC News website and then go to either American News, Mother Jones, or Democracy Now! and check out how “important and scary” the headlines sound; how scary is the world we live in? The BBC reports some boring facts: Trump got his travel ban knocked down (again), there was an earthquake in Greenland, and…whatever. The Huffington Post declares that “TRUMP SLIPS ON BAN APPEAL.” Same news story with the same facts but different presentation in the headline. American News pronounces on a video that “Anti Sharia Law Rallies Erupt in Major Cities Across the Country – Chaos Ensues [LOOK]” Wow. Holy shit! Apparently people are trying to push Sharia law in the US and there’s basically a WAR going on over how crazy this is? Apparently the BBC doesn’t give two shits about it, probably because it’s sensationalized bullshit that a cheap conservative news website shoveled out to rally their base. HuffPost also mentions that a congressman unveiled an impeachment draft against Trump, which is curiously absent from the front page of the other two websites, almost as if it’s sensationalized bullshit that a cheap liberal news website shoveled out to rally their base. Democracy Now! has a damn category at the top called “Impeachment.” Protip: Trump isn’t immediately on the verge of being impeached (He’s going to be impeached — I’ll bet money on it — but it doesn’t require a headline yet.). CNN, just for shits and giggles declares that “Dennis Rodman heading to North Korea.” CNN has good bigly news people…[Like everything else, I wrote this shit yesterday so the headlines changed; you won’t see the headlines I mentioned. I can’t keep up with this shit.]

I’m not saying the BBC are infallible journalists or whatever, they just seem to present dry facts with minimal bullshit that these other examples present. My point here is that if you are a conservative and only read/watch conservative news, aren’t you just being spoonfed a bunch of shit that you already know and that makes you feel comfortable in your worldview? The same goes for a liberal person as well: if you already know for a fact that Trump is the devil himself, why do you need to read a bunch of shit confirming it? Whenever I see a link shared on Facebook from HuffPost or Democracy Now! I never click it because I know it’s going to be shit. Same when I see a Fox News or American News or Liberty-Whatever-The-Fuck-News from someone proclaiming “They’re going to take our guns!” It’s confirmation bias in a near textbook form — no one wants to possibly accept a different worldview so we close our minds off from the possibility while simultaneously thinking we’re being open to new facts but not really.

It doesn’t all involve simple news websites and channels as well: it also applies to social media. I think I’ll write more about this later, but we all have our favor sites to visit and people to interact with. Do these influence our worldview in a negative way? Do they tell us happy things we already know? Do they scare us into sticking with our current beliefs? I frequent Reddit, and I’ll use it as an example. Check out the World News subreddit. It leans left and if you look at any posts about Donald Trump it will have tons of hate. It’s fun to read too. Now check out The_Donald. It speaks for itself. They’re Echo Chambers: places to hear the same confirming facts over and over again.

So, obviously, that all Sucks. There are facts – indisputable facts – but the interpretation of those facts is down to whoever you seem to ask. If all you read are these borderline news websites that just regurgitate your worldview you aren’t learning anything and aren’t doing anything to solve the problem. We all have our Echo Chambers that solidify our worldviews and this does nobody any favors. This applies to both political outlooks conservative and liberal alike, so don’t think you’re up on a high horse when everyone else is stupid. It goes without saying that this lack of mixing ideas and compromising Sucks and has a large part to play in how polarized our current state of politics is.

As you probably know, the bill that was supposed to repeal and replace Obamacare didn’t have the required votes to pass the House of Representatives so they pulled the bill. That bill, officially known as the American Health Care Act, or as it will probably be known to history as Ryancare (or Trumpcare, or Republicare? lol), had a rocky start from the beginning. Wasn’t the bill drafted in secrecy and was kept locked away from people? Being a bill that was meant to change federal law on health care you’d expect secrecy probably wasn’t the best route to go with, and it started the bill off in a bad way. Publicity for it didn’t get any better as people learned what was in it: 24 million people would lose insurance, medicare funding would be rolled back, pre-existing conditions would be a thing again, among other provisions. The bill had an approval rating of 17%, which was an insanely low number. People called and bitched to their representatives, and I don’t see how anyone actually wanted it to pass except those asshats that dwell in the House of Representatives.

Obamacare Sucks (aka the Affordable Care Act, or ACA), and I’m not here to defend it by any means, but it’s sort of okay. There’s some cool parts to it, and there are some bad parts. I for one don’t like the idea of mandating that people buy something; it just seems like a surefire way of making prices skyrocket (Because if people have to buy your product, why not jack up the price?). But it’s okay. It can be fixed, and at the very worst, it could be repealed. We did “okay” without the ACA before 2007, and the US wouldn’t fall apart if it was repealed. And that’s what I expected after November: a flat-out repeal of Obamacare! There was a Republican controlled House, Senate, and a Republican in the White House. How could the damn thing not be repealed after years and years of people bitching about how awful Obamacare was?

Well, that’s what I’m getting at here. The bill didn’t pass, but it wasn’t due to the Democrats controlling the legislature, or by having a president slap the thing down with a veto: it failed because of how incompetent the Republican party is and how terrible the bill was. Dear Leader Trump blamed the Democrats for the bill’s failure; after all not a single Democrat voted for it so “obviously” it was their fault it didn’t pass. But when your own party is in control of everything you don’t need the Democrats’ votes you fucking idiot. The bill failed because they couldn’t even get Republicans on board with how shitty it was.

The hardcore-right Republicans (the Freedom Caucus) hated the bill because it wasn’t extreme enough; they wanted a full-out repeal of Obamacare (once again, wasn’t this the goal?) They wanted Obamacare murdered and gutted whereas the bill sort of halfass did away with certain provisions of it in an attempt to dance around a full repeal. The moderate Republicans didn’t like the bill because people would lose insurance and it wouldn’t really help anything. These people probably had that angry 80% of the population calling and griping to them about the bill and didn’t want to get screwed over in the midterms. Anyways, Republicans couldn’t even agree on it, and even though they control everything, they still couldn’t pass the damn thing.

“Obamacare is the law of the land. It is going to remain the law of the land until it is replaced…We’re going to be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable future.”

-Paul Ryan

And let’s not forget that the whole “repeal Obamacare” thing has been being repeated over and over for the past 7 years. There was plenty of time to conjure up some health care bill that would get rid of the ACA and give the free market the power and freedom it needs to please conservatives and maybe lower prices. Nope. Let’s pull a bill out of our asses in a couple of weeks and have a vote on it! Let’s also ignore the fact that healthcare is a very hard topic to play with, and it has burned almost everyone who attempted to work on it. Let’s do that first!

How much do you have to Suck to fuck up that bad? I, like everyone else, was certain Obamacare was going to be destroyed within a month of the inauguration and somehow the Republicans fuck up bad enough that it remains. “Obamacare will remain the law of the land.” Seriously? You fucks said you’d repeal Obamacare over and over the past however many years and even with control of the House, the Senate, and the White House you guys still couldn’t do it? Welcome to my blog, Republican representatives; You people really do Suck.